Paranoid Android

J. Edgar, director Clint Eastwood's new collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio about the secretive, power-hungry man who created the FBI, is really two films in one: a lousy history lesson and a surprisingly affecting love story

A viewer can't help wishing the filmmakers had said the hell with it and skipped the dreary sketch-work that fills in the rest of the title character's Wikipedia entry. Hoover died in 1972 after an incredible 40-plus years of bossing an agency he essentially invented. Depending on which end of the political spectrum is talking, he was either one of America's 20th-century saviors or a bigger danger to democracy than his targets. From the Founders' days to World War I, we'd done OK without a nationwide law-enforcement apparatus.

He was also the kind of innovator who loomed much larger in his lifetime than he does in hindsight. Maybe those are the historical figures we ought to pay more attention to, since their names going dim means we've absorbed the institutional version of their craftiness. But that isn't J. Edgar's subject—not when the movie's effective, anyway.

Dick Cheney fans have every right to mourn the relatively short shrift Eastwood and Black give to his great predecessor's genius for making anything he wanted to happen—mainly for the sake of increasing his power—seem urgently necessary. Nimbly depicted in J. Edgar's opening scenes, the Red Scare of 1919 gave Hoover his opening, and the parallels to our time's war on terror are hard to miss. In both cases, a genuine threat got converted into the kind of hysteria an opportunist knew how to turn to advantage.

The way the movie tells it, this particular opportunist was a born mama's boy whose idea of making good may not have been everyone's, Mom's included. While she could have used a tad less of a Masterpiece Theater treatment from her too-respectful director, Judi Dench as Annie Hoover is one step away from Mrs. Bates in Psycho. Linking Hoover's most celebrated alleged fetish—cross-dressing—to his grief at her death may or may not prove that Black knows his man, but it does prove he knows his movie history.

Nonetheless, Hoover's rise to power mostly mates perfunctory directing with bad CGI until Hammer's Tolson comes along. His eyes as liquid as squid ink, his smile forever ready to add toothy chalk, he's almost a caricature of a gay love object. (It can't possibly be intentional—can it?—that he also has a highly entertaining resemblance to Rick Santorum.) But that suits the movie's conception of Hoover, who's so repressed—thanks, Ma—that he couldn't fall for anything less than a cartoon wife. And go to his grave, as the script implies he did, denying any same-sex attraction was involved.

At least until a truly terrible old-age makeup job does him in—and the one on Naomi Watts, who plays Hoover's longtime secretary if not substitute mom, ain't much better—Hammer's performance is top-notch, sparking DiCaprio to play more intimately off a co-star than he has in years. (As a rule, our time's Genius Actors aren't much on inter-acting.) Because they're so good together and Eastwood is at his best in handling their cronyish, tender pas de deux, it's an annoyance whenever the movie lumbers off to tend to its biopic obligations with tepid scenes dramatizing Hoover's swelling fame and increasingly untouchable fiefdom.

Black did an outstanding job of reconciling Harvey Milk's private and public dimensions in Milk, but that was easier. Not only was Milk's guiding passion about as personal as politics gets, but his career as a public figure only lasted a few years. Hoover, on the other hand, stayed at the FBI's helm through eight presidents. The filmmakers' attempts to remind us of that big swath of history are like random postcards mailed from the set of another movie altogether. If J. Edgar's dim version of Bobby Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan) would barely pass muster on a sitcom, the movie's scowling Nixon (Christopher Shyer) makes Donovan look like Ian McKellen ripping out Shakespeare.

One exception is the movie's protracted treatment of the 1932 abduction of aviator Charles Lindbergh's infant son, which gets more screen time than any other episode of Hoover's crowded career. While it's true the case expanded the FBI's authority once Congress made kidnapping a federal crime, that doesn't quite account for its prominence when so many other flashpoints of the man's long reign have been reduced to blips.

Eastwood directs the Lindbergh sequences with extra care, compounding the viewer's puzzlement. What drew him to reprise a situation he's already done to death in Mystic River and Changeling? This sort of thing may gladden auteurists' hearts—ah, the disturbing theme of the Lost Child in Clint's later work—but the Philistine temptation is to grumble that he's repeating himself to no purpose. If we're meant to subliminally equate the Lindbergh baby's fate with Hoover's own emotionally crippling upbringing (he has a childhood stammer that returns whenever the adult J. Edgar is self-conscious), that's both a hell of a stretch and too oblique to register.

Other parts of J. Edgar suggest dimensions in Black's script that went MIA in the cutting room. The movie keeps returning to Hoover's legendary vendetta against Martin Luther King, but in a fairly cryptic and unsatisfying way. Even when we see a raging Hoover dictate a scurrilous letter meant to cause discord in King's flock, there's no payoff; we don't learn whether it ever went public. The chronology gets fairly hazy too, with MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech placed after the JFK assassination.

Eastwood and Black also don't seem to appreciate the significance of Hoover's having been a native Washingtonian. That goes a long way toward explaining not only his racial bigotries but his defensive hauteur, since it made him an anomaly in government circles. As usual in political movies, D.C.'s very idiosyncratic environment isn't rendered at all. Eastwood has no feel for the place or its distinctive manners, vital to understanding how Hoover's marriage-in-all-but-name to Tolson could keep the capital snickering for decades and never mar his public image nationwide.

With all those flaws, though, J. Edgar is still Eastwood's best work since 2006's masterly Letters From Iwo Jima, and especially welcome after the baffling Hereafter. Whenever DiCaprio and Hammer are alone in a room—and sometimes DiCaprio and Dench, too—there's so much going on that you can easily forgive the misfires elsewhere. As for any potential oddity in the onetime Dirty Harry directing an uncommonly poignant and convincing gay romance, let us note that Oliver Stone, that great left-wing thinker, used the Hoover-Tolson relationship for the ugliest kind of gay-baiting in Nixon a decade and a half ago. To Eastwood, it's not just something to take in stride, the way he did in the underrated Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil—it's evidence that even a figure as monstrous as Hoover had some thwarted humanity in him. Though you can't quite share Tolson's grief when Hoover dies, you can believe it, and that's a miracle. So who's the enlightened one again?